Geolocation of objects or points of interest on the ground from airborne sensors is an enabler to
support many useful purposes. While many commercial handheld cameras today perform
rudimentary geo-tagging of images, few outside of commercial or military tactical airborne sensors
have implemented the methods necessary to produce full three-dimensional coordinates as well as
perform rigorous metric error propagation to estimate the uncertainties of those calculated
coordinates. The critical ingredients for this fully metric capability include careful characterization
of the sensor system, capturing and disseminating a complete metadata profile with the imagery, and
having a validated sensor model to support the necessary transformations between the image space
and the ground space. This paper describes important characteristics of metadata, the methods of
geopositioning which can be applied, and including advantages and limitations. In addition, it will
present the benefits of using active sensors and some recent efforts focusing on geopositioning from
full-motion video (FMV) sensors.
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